Lew, your "Bad Dad" poem keeps making me weep -- so why do I keep reading it? I think maybe it's that somehow having somebody else write down what would be one's own worst nightmare is bizarrely comforting. I don't know. But indeed, sad stuff.

Stumbling onward as one tends to do, Cl.

Oh, Lew, this poem! It should be as well known as "This Be the Verse." -- MK

May 11, 2014

For as long as I have known the meaning and origin of my surname, I have known about the Putnams of Salem, Massachusetts, and their involvement in the Witch Hunt of 1692. Luigi Turco met May Laura Putnam — “Mom May” as she liked to call herself, because of the pun, I suppose — at a Methodist camp in Wakefield, Massachusetts, where she was working as a missionary among Italian immigrants. At the time she was an old maid in her thirties who had pulled herself out of rural poverty in Superior, Wisconsin, by sheer wit and strength of will. Despite the desperate penury of her second generation Danish mother, born Laura Christine Larsen; the shiftlessness of her father, William Herbert Putnam, descendant of an old New England family, and the competition of her six brothers and two sisters, Mom May had made something of herself, becoming the only one of the Putnam siblings to attend and graduate from college — Boston University’s School of Religious Education.

Believe it or believe it not,

My mother was a Putnam once.

On her ancestral tree she swears

The Lowells and the Deweys too

Hang pendulous as lovely pears.

My grampaw was a sort of dunce

Who rather let things go to pot —

Himself, his offspring, farm and wife.

My grampaw was a sort of dunce.

His homestead I remember well:

The floors were warped, the doors askew,

And now and then the rafters fell.

My mother was a Putnam once —

She led a less than social life,

So she went East from grampaw's West.

My mother was a Putnam once

Till she was married, woe O! woe.

No longer was she maiden free —

She cursed her pa from pate to toe.

My grampaw was a sort of dunce

To cheat the eaglet in its nest

By willing her a woman's form.

My grampaw was a sort of dunce,

But what a hefty name he wore!

He gave my middle name to me;

It fits me like a saddlesore.

My mother was a Putnam once,

I'd be one too, come sun or storm.

The Deweys and the Lowell hosts

Are pendant from a hollow tree.

Now with this rime let them be felled,

Let me be nothing more to me

Than windfalls blasted by the frosts.

My mother was a Putnam once;

My grampaw was a sort of dunce.

Mom May was wrong about the Lowells, but right about the Deweys.

So my parents married and I was born into their middle age. We lived a while in Buffalo near my father's sister, Vita Sardella, and her family. I was christened Lewis (my mother was having no other "Luigi" in the family) Putnam (hyphenated last names were not yet current in the U.S.) Turco, and then we moved to Meriden, where I was brought up unaware of how poor we were. Thinking back on my early life, I consider it remarkable that my parents, given their own histories, brought up their children as members of the middle class who had no doubt at all we were as privileged as anyone else. Though we had no money, the house was full of books of all sorts. My parents read to me practically from the moment I was born, and soon I was reading for myself.

April 12, 2014

As soon as he woke up he remembered the last thing that had happened before he lost consciousness. He had been sitting in his favorite chair in front of the television set watching the evening news. His wife had been sitting on the sofa watching as well in the parlor of their second-floor flat in the house that they had bought late in their lives and marriage. The news wasn’t good — was it ever? — but he and his wife were comfortable for the first time in their lives, and had been for several years of his retirement as pastor of the First Italian Baptist Church. They had lived in this small Connecticut city since 1939; their children had grown up and gone, gotten married themselves, one lived nearby — a toolmaker for Pratt & Whitney, the other in upstate New York — a college professor. The professor, the older boy, was the one he’d wanted to be a minister too, but that was not to be.

He remembered the sudden sharp pain in his chest, falling forward out of his chair, hitting the floor and then nothing until he had awakened.

No, that wasn’t right. He awoke, and still there was nothing.

There was no light, if he had eyes, only darkness. He saw nothing, he felt nothing, if he had fingers to feel with; he heard nothing — there was nothing to hear or, apparently, with which to hear. He could not breathe, nor did he need to even had there been something to breathe. He did not understand how he was able to think, if he were, indeed, thinking.

He lay awhile (was he “lying”?) attempting to do the things he remembered he used to do. He tried to shout, but he could make no sound, couldn’t have heard it if he had made one, had no mouth with which to utter anything. All he could do was recollect, feel as though he were going mad, experience despair and frustration for — how long?

The conclusion he reached was inevitable and inescapable: he had died in his parlor while watching the evening news on NBC. Until that moment he had been certain that when he died something would happen. He would awaken to the Life Beyond. He would be ushered into the Presence of his Maker. Glory would abound. Something certainly would happen, not nothing. It was impossible for Nothing to happen! Or, if it did, it would be impossible for him to experience it. He would simply be nothing.

Or had the ancient Greeks gotten it right? Was this Erebus? Was this the pure darkness of Tartarus, of the Underworld where the lost souls go to “live” in emptiness, without hope? When he was a boy living in Sicily, which the Greeks had colonized centuries before his own people, the Turks, had conquered that island, he had from time to time heard snippets and shards of Greek mythology. He had heard about Erebus and wondered about it.

And as a member of an unobserving Roman Catholic family, long before his conversion to Waldensian Protestantism, he had wondered about Purgatory. Had the Church adopted the Greeks’ Erebus, as they had adopted so many other things from paganism, like holidays and saints? Was this, then, Purgatory, which would prove that his concept of the afterlife had been erroneous, and his life, consequently, had been useless? What there was left of him, here, in this all-consuming darkness, despaired.

Would there be no end to this nothingness? Would there be no union with the Godhead, no reunions with those he had left behind, those who had preceded him? He tried to put out feelers, tentacles from his mind to test the blankness engulfing him. He felt that he would go mad, that he would like to go mad because he could not bear this soulless emptiness any longer. And how long had it been? It felt as though it had been eternal.

He could not believe it when he woke up again. But had he awakened? What was all this light?

March 02, 2014

This is my 10-year-old granddaughter Phoebe reading a poem I wrote for her. The other day she decided she was going to disprove the existence of the Tooth Fairy. She took her loose tooth out on the sly (apparently) and put it under her pillow without telling anyone about it. The next morning she announced, "The Tooth Fairy doesn't exist!" Phoebe was minus a dollar, but her family was nonplussed, which was what she wanted.

A while earlier, she had written a story which I read. It sounded an awful lot like the fantasies I started writing at about her age, but I never wrote an ending as good as hers, which I think is great:

As a scientist, Phoebe has devised a successful experiment to disprove the existence of the Tooth Fairy; as a writer, she has devised a story ending that is symbolically wholly adult, and she is an artist as well -- the top image is hers:

Needless to say, I am amazed by Phoebe's talents, and I'm as proud of her as I can be.

February 13, 2013

When I was five years of age my brother, Gene, was
born in Meriden, Connecticut. His middle
name is "Laurent" — the male version of "Laura," my
mother’s middle name, just as my first name is “Lewis,” the English version of
“Luigi,” and my middle name is “Putnam,” my mother’s maiden name. It was many
years before I realized the derivation of "Gene": it is the American
version of "Gino," which is short for "Luigi" — my father
had named both his sons after himself!
In my second collection of poems, a chapbook titled The Sketches of Lewis Turco and Livevil: A Mask (1962), I wrote
about our childhood:

GENE

"Ragtail Gene, don't tag along here;

scram
on home or I'll bop your nose."

Brother, come the first of April,

that
was the word the second of May

and
all you heard when our lead pipe cannon

swallowed
a cherry bomb and belched a stone

that
boomed across the Fourth of July,

nearly
crocking you where you hid

to spy
on all the older kids.

If the world grew huger in your eyes,

that
was because they went wide

to
hear the clubhouse secrets told

in the
dark garage where gasoline

smelled
about good enough to swill.

For, the first you knew of going,

you
knew because we swore our raft

was
not a raft, but a ship to float

a
boy's body out of sight

and a
man's voice too deep for sounding.

That's the way that I am going;

ragtail
Gene, don't tag along here.

When I was in the eighth grade my father sent me
off to Suffield Academy in Suffield, Connecticut. He told me that he was doing it to give me
the best education he could, but he evidently told my brother that he sent me
away to save Gene's life. I don't
recollect that I was all that homicidal toward my sibling. The worst thing I remember doing was tying
him to the porch of the parsonage on Windsor Avenue when I was supposed to be
baby-sitting him. I wanted to play with
my neighborhood buddies instead, and I knew he was safe because I could hear
him yelling.

One weekend while I was in the Navy and Gene was in
high school I came back on liberty to Meriden and discovered that he had gotten
himself into some sort of trouble. Papa and Mom May talked to me about it in
distress, and I think I must have become angry, because I wrote “The Hustle”:

It was very strange, it seemed to me, that Gene had
gotten into a scrape because he was, and still is, a very nice guy. He had
never been a minute’s trouble all his childhood, to my recollection, except
that he was accident-prone. Strange things happened to him: once he walked
through the smoke of a bonfire — in those days one could burn leaves in the
fall — and came down with a case of poison-ivy all over his body. Another time
he and some of his friends were playing with a BB gun and he was shot in the
eye which split his cornea. For most of our lives we have gotten along pretty
well, our wives like each other, and our kids all get along on those few
occasions when they get together. The poem is an over-reach, over-the-top.
Reading it now, it seems to me that I was writing about the 1950s, not my
brother.

Jean and I had graduated from Meriden High in 1952.
Two or three years later rock-n-roll had arrived, the new teen-agers were acting
quite strangely, wearing d. a. hairdos (that’s “duck’s ass” in case anyone
wonders) and developing the culture that would eventually lead to American Graffiti, Hair, James Dean’s Rebel
without a Cause and the Beatniks. My wife and I had grown up in the
post-World War II culture, where the last days of swing and bebop and bobbysox
were fading into the unsettling and ominous future.

The Virginia Quarterly Review"The Mutable Past," a memoir collected in FANTASEERS, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Lewis Turco of growing up in the 1950s in Meriden, Connecticut, (Scotsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2005).

The Tower JournalTwo short stories, "The Demon in the Tree" and "The Substitute Wife," in the spring 2009 issue of Tower Journal.

The Tower JournalMemoir, “Pookah, The Greatest Cat in the History of the World,” Spring-Summer 2010.

The Michigan Quarterly ReviewThis is the first terzanelle ever published, in "The Michigan Quarterly Review" in 1965. It has been gathered in THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LEWIS TURCO/WESLI COURT, 1953-2004 (www.StarCloudPress.com).

The Gawain PoetAn essay on the putative medieval author of "Gawain and the Green Knight" in the summer 2010 issue of Per Contra.